On Jan 21, 2006, at 5:38 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

> I *really* need to work on my Occlumency skills ;-)

Well, publishing Islands was a pretty big tip-off. :-)

I've been mulling this over from time to time as well. It occurred to  
me that one of the big drawbacks to message passing concurrency is  
that Islands are much heavier than Processes. That would be even more  
true if they were based on native threads or OS processes.

But, since we're talking about substantially modifying the VM, there  
might be a way to avoid bloat. If we allowed class pointers to be  
distant as well, we could have a system that created relatively small  
Islands, starting with a single object. Islands would grow as new  
objects were created inside them, message arguments were passed by  
value, or CompiledMethods, Classes, literals and the like were pulled  
into the Island spoon-style.

This kind of a system would require rethinking the way the  
development environment works, system changes are managed etc, since  
there isn't really a clearly-delimited "image" anymore. It would be  
interesting to see what kind of system emerged from that.

Colin